Posted by: Garfunkel

Make default orders check whether the ship in question can complete it before executing it. For example, I have a Survey Group with a Jump Tender and multiple Survey Ships. I set Grav Survey as its default order and order the TG to split into individual ships after jumping through an unknown JP. Afterwards, I have to remember to clear default orders for the CJ as otherwise it will fruitlessly try to survey the JP locations.

Posted by: Steve Walmsley

I'm not advocating that particular use of POWs, but I would like to see them have some added effect or utility in the game. I run across planets that have survivors and POWs on them, but I can't really do anything with them, as far as I can tell.

That is a bug in VB6. The random POWs you find are from old games. They aren't being deleted correctly.

Posted by: JacenHan

Fires are much more dangerous in space. Spaceships are enclosed systems, you can't just vent the heat and toxic smoke the way you can on Earth. On the other hand, ships will be designed presuming that you need to close down entire sections of the ship at a time from air flow, either because of a hull breach or because of a fire or any other disaster, so fire control is a lot easier; just let the fire consume all oxygen and if possible use the cooling system to chill the local temperature to below the ignition temperature. Or, for that matter, open the burning sections to hard vacuum, it'll resolve itself soon enough.

Posted by: Barkhorn

tachyon technologies, between both a displacement drive (or "wink" drive) also a tachyon gun that "teleports bombs into or around other ships" source is from the Odyssey One Book series

Your tachyon gun idea is basically what mesons do. Mesons don't interact with anything, and when they decay they release a huge amount of energy. You can control how long a meson takes to decay when you create it. So what happens is, the fire control computer decides how far away the target is, and thus how long the meson should take to decay. The meson is fired, it passes cleanly through the armor because mesons don't interact with anything. Then, assuming the FC was accurate in it's distance measurement, the meson decays inside the ship, and goes off like a bomb.

They also travel at 99% the speed of light, so as far as the target is concerned, it teleported there.

Posted by: Hazard

Fires are much more dangerous in space. Spaceships are enclosed systems, you can't just vent the heat and toxic smoke the way you can on Earth. On the other hand, ships will be designed presuming that you need to close down entire sections of the ship at a time from air flow, either because of a hull breach or because of a fire or any other disaster, so fire control is a lot easier; just let the fire consume all oxygen and if possible use the cooling system to chill the local temperature to below the ignition temperature. Or, for that matter, open the burning sections to hard vacuum, it'll resolve itself soon enough.

Posted by: Barkhorn

Damage to a ship should do more than just reduce the HTK or break parts. It should also have a chance to start a fire. Aurora generally tries to emulate 20th and 21st century naval warfare, and during that time period fire was a major threat to warships. It's a major reason the IJN suffered so badly in WW2. Japanese crews weren't trained to fight fires; they had designated damage control teams. Crews were trained to abandon their station and call for a DC team in the event of fire. This meant that the fire would burn uncontrolled for several minutes, and would be much worse by the time the damage control team arrived. American crews on the other hand were all trained to immediately start fire fighting.

Compare two examples. The IJN Akagi was hit by a single 1000lb bomb at approximately 10:30AM, June 4th during the Battle of Midway. Over the course of the day, Japanese damage control teams fought a losing battle against the flames, and at 4:30AM June 5th they were forced to scuttle the ship.

The USN Bunker Hill was hit by two kamikazes and two 550lb bombs in quick succession during the Battle of Okinawa. 390 crew were killed, but fires were put out and the ship was saved.

Posted by: sloanjh

FYI, there is now an official suggestion thread in the C# section (v0.x). Since Steve is committed to getting the C# version out, it is extremely unlikely that there will ever be another VB version of Aurora, so any new suggestions should go into the C# thread.

Thanks,John

PS - please read the posting guidelines at the beginning of that thread if you are unfamiliar with the way Steve uses the suggestion thread as a tracking database.

Posted by: Erik Luken

Similar to the button to export all designed ship classes as a text file, would it be feasible to have a similar function for racial techs/components/missiles as well? A common issue I run into when discussing Aurora with friends of mine who play it is that attempting to reverse-engineer someone's ships accurately from just the export data is pretty much impossible, and even with the help of the technology summary screen it's a tedious process- especially if someone is using tactics like not making use of the highest tech level available to them for whatever reason, or if a component is simply old.

It'd also be a great boon for people attempting to do any sort of multiplayer interaction that doesn't involve hotswapping database files (design competitions and such, I'm personally setting one such friendly brawl between two folks at the moment which is what prompted this suggestion).

I think a lot of people like that trying to reverse-engineer is not exact. Not to say that sort of button won't be useful

Posted by: Conscript Gary

Similar to the button to export all designed ship classes as a text file, would it be feasible to have a similar function for racial techs/components/missiles as well? A common issue I run into when discussing Aurora with friends of mine who play it is that attempting to reverse-engineer someone's ships accurately from just the export data is pretty much impossible, and even with the help of the technology summary screen it's a tedious process- especially if someone is using tactics like not making use of the highest tech level available to them for whatever reason, or if a component is simply old.

It'd also be a great boon for people attempting to do any sort of multiplayer interaction that doesn't involve hotswapping database files (design competitions and such, I'm personally setting one such friendly brawl between two folks at the moment which is what prompted this suggestion).

Posted by: TMaekler

I haven't tackled the inexperienced fleet penalties yet, so I will bear this in mind when I do. There are some complexities though. Not all orders involve direction and the ship should only stop anyway if you remove the existing order and give a new one. Some form of abandon current order and move to next might be an option (with a delay) but the issue is that the second order may not make sense unless the first is completed. Another option may be that the crew operates on its own initiative until it responds to an order (moving away or toward the enemy depending on morale). In general though Aurora ships all stop when completing their orders list as it would not make sense for them to continue in the same direction.

I see the problems that could arise. Continuing on is mainly important in battle. So maybe just a switch which sets a ship in battle mode (Red Alert) causes movement commands to continue when given a new movement command. Any other command and the ship stops (and possibly leaves Red Alert mode).